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Shyam Pujara
Mr. Daudelin
AP English A4
20 December 2014
A Problem That Needs Fixing (Final)
For hundreds of years, minoritiesAfrican Americans, Chinese immigrants, women
have been fighting ardently for their right to vote in the United States. The struggle for equal
rights, dubbed the Civil Rights movement, has largely been a success. Legislation during the
Reconstruction era in the mid-late nineteenth century enfranchised all men of voting age, and the
nineteenth amendment did the same for women about fifty years later. Today, Americans take
pride in the democratic foundation of the United States. Proud of their ability to make change in
society, many citizens take part in the political process every four years, heading to the polls to
have a voice in the world of politics. However, unbeknownst to many citizens, that very voice
that voters strive to have is being silenced at the whim of corrupt politicians. Through a process
called gerrymandering, political parties or groups with vested interests can manipulate the shapes
of voting districts to achieve partisan policy agendas.
Gerrymandering is, by definition, the process of shaping districts or electoral
constituencies to favor a particular group or political party. The process gives politicians more
power in determining the fate of elections than the constituents. It also gives votes a
disproportionate valuethe vote of a republican may mean more than the vote of a democrat in a
certain district, and in another gerrymandered district, the vote of some republicans may be
completely meaningless. Gerrymandering, despite being manipulative and unfair, is legal. It is
within a state legislatures legal rights to redraw district lines, often with the goal of protecting an

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incumbents seat in Congress. The redrawing of district lines may externally seem to many
people to have little effect, but adept political parties can gerrymander in ways that essentially
waste the votes of large sums of people. Political parties gerrymander in ways such that their
opponents constituents are grouped into districts that either win by a large margin or lose by a
narrow one, thus wasting excess votes that would not contribute to the final electoral result,
which is how the votes of many people in some districts may be considered meaningless. A
consequence of gerrymandering, then, is that the results of elections may not be representative of
what the majority of people voted for. The process gives powerful political parties more
influence than actual voters, something that should not happen in a truly democratic society.
Gerrymanderings negative consequences are further exemplified by the nature and the
goals of the process itself; political parties generally aim to give minorities a disproportionate
amount of power in elections (it could be more or less, depending on the specific party). This
violates the underlying principle of a democratic society with universal suffrage: one man one
vote. Gerrymandering, in essence, can give one minoritys vote more meaning than that of a nonminority, or vice versa, which is a blatant violation of the governing principles of democracy.
The manipulation of representation that is prevalent in gerrymandering is a testament to the
corruption of the practice and is further reason for the process to be outlawed or amended.
The process of redistricting does not have to involve corrupt gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering can be simply fixed through the reallocation of the redistricting job to a
nonpartisan, third party group rather than a partisan state legislature. Of course, the process of
changing which groups have roles in redistricting is much more difficult than it may seem.
Because of how deeply entrenched gerrymandering is in the political culture of the United States,
any initiatives to stop it will be met with fierce opposition from interest groups or incumbents

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who need to stay in office. Because many lawmakers win elections by gerrymandering, it is very
difficult to convince those same legislators to ban the practice that got them elected. Another
problem that arises with the idea of passing the redistricting job onto a neutral agency is that it is
very hard to find a completely nonpartisan group in the heavily partisan realm of American
politics. In American politics, most groups have vested interests which will create bias when
creating new districts. Moreover, it is feasible that political bribery or clandestine party alliances
could occur, swaying the opinions of the supposedly nonpartisan group. Still, using a third party
nonpartisan group could be a plausible way to redistrict of these obstacles are overcome.
To combat the practice of gerrymandering, a neutral party should be brought in which
would have full power in the redrawing of district lines. In an attempt to create a nonpartisan
group with little bias, there could be prerequisites for becoming a person who redistricts state
lines. For example, it could be required that the redistricters have political experience in a
nonpartisan background, such as a judge who is trained to not bias his or her decisions. However,
it is possible that there may not be ample judges to fill all of the redistricting jobs. If that is the
case, group could be designed that has equal numbers of democrats or republicans, who would
hopefully keep each other in check, as does the system of checks in balances in the federal
government. This group of democrats and republicans would be chosen by a group of
nonpartisan judges to ensure that people arent chosen in a partisan manner either. To finally
ensure that members of the new redistricting group do not gerrymander, information that is vital
to gerrymandering could be made confidential as a precautionary measure. For example, the
specific number of each type of minority and the political parties of each minority could be
withheld from the public to prevent redistricters from gaining access to this knowledge. This new

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redistricting group would be able to effectively draw new district lines in states without partisan
influence and would help maintain US politics as what it ought to bedemocratic.
The benefits of putting an end to gerrymandering would be monumental. Gerrymandering
does to the vote what inflation does to money: it makes it worth less. A vote of a minority, say, a
black democrat, would mean much less than that of a white republican under the gerrymandering
of a republican dominated state legislature. The same goes for the vote of a white man under a
democrat run state legislature. Minority or not, gerrymandering invariably hurts the votes of
people who do not belong to the same political party that the majority of their state legislature
does. No suffrage advocate of the nineteenth of twentieth centuries would want a voting process
in which a few wealthy politicians decide the outcomes of nationwide elections. That is not what
suffrage is about. It is about giving each American an equal say in who he or she wants to
become President, Congressman, or elected official. The Civil Rights movement is far from over.
Ending gerrymandering is one step in further realizing the goals of that movement.
For a long time, Americans have fought for their ability to make a difference in politics.
Modern gerrymandering, however, takes that ability away from the American. It devalues his
vote and can make it essentially worthless. The democratic voting system that the United States
has to be preserved, and that cannot be done with an unfair, cunning, and widespread system like
gerrymandering. Hope should not be lost; a solution lingers in the air: take the partisan aspect out
of gerrymandering by assigning a nonpartisan group the job of redistricting. Only then will
America be truly democratic.